Frontpage, by Matthew Vadum, July 3, 2015:
Federal investigators may be closer to seizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illicit off-site email server as evidence emerges that she transmitted classified information through it and that key Obama White House officials knew about her clandestine email account for years.
On Tuesday the Department of State made available on its website 3,000 pages of Clinton’s emails. Clinton emphatically declared months ago that none of the thousands of emails she sent using her hacker-friendly dedicated server contained classified information.
As it turns out the State Department had to redact 25 of the newly unveiled emails because they contained the very same classified information Hillary said she didn’t send. This is but a fraction of the 55,000 pages of email the former secretary of state gave to the diplomatic agency for processing. Under federal court order, the State Department is conducting monthly Clinton document dumps after screening and redacting the emails.
Clinton has admitted that tens of thousands of the emails she sent that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted. Emails were scrubbed while subject to a subpoena from the House Select Committee that is investigating the terrorist attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that took place on Sept. 11, 2012.
Around the time of the attack Clinton scapegoated the innocent director of an anti-Islam movie trailer that almost nobody had seen. She claimed back then that the sophisticated military-style operation materialized spontaneously from an angry mob of protesters gathered outside the facility which was in Islamist-held territory. The Benghazi coverup the Obama administration engineered to get President Obama safely reelected in November 2012 has been gradually falling apart.
This new revelation that classified information went out into cyberspace by way of Clinton’s laughably insecure server clears the way for the U.S. government to seize the machine itself, the Washington Times reports.
Despite demands from Republicans on Capitol Hill who are investigating Clinton, she has steadfastly refused to hand over the server whose existence became public knowledge earlier this year. She caused a firestorm before launching her presidential bid when she admitted that all her government emails from her time at the Department of State were routed through her own personal Internet server that has been traced back to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home address.
PolitiFact confirmed that Clinton didn’t use government email when she was at the State Department — not even once. “Although some former secretaries of state occasionally used personal emails for official business, Clinton is the only one who never once used an @state.gov email address in the era of email,” the fact-check organization previously concluded.
A former senior intelligence official told the Washington Times that government policy now requires a thorough investigation with an eye to the other Internet servers through which the classified information may have passed.
According to the news report:
The procedures are spelled out by the National Security Agency’s special panel on controlling leaked secrets, called the Committee on National Security Systems. It published a policy, “Securing Data and Handling Spillage Events,” that fits the case of Mrs. Clinton’s unauthorized private server, kept at her home while she was secretary of state, according to the retired officer’s reading of the regulations.
The policy stipulates that “[m]alicious attacks are alarming, but more often spillages occur from unintentional user error or negligence.”
“Hillary Clinton’s server has classified information and should be taken by the government and sanitized, wiped clean or destroyed,” said the cybersecurity expert who requested anonymity. It is not clear if any of the procedures have yet been carried out in this case, he said.
Clinton’s fast and loose approach to email security almost certainly compromised U.S. national security.
Clinton’s emails and telephone calls were probably targeted by foreign governments’ intelligence agencies, the former official said. Her server was probably breached, he added.
“If Clinton’s personal email server wasn’t hacked by China or Russia, forget the Presidency,” Chris Soghoian the ACLU’s lead technologist quipped on Twitter
quipped on Twitter. “She should be the next cyber czar.”
Clinton’s email account was a virtual open book for hackers from hostile governments and terrorist groups, but anyone who interacted with her through it was also placed at risk. This is because, as one news report stated, whoever created the system “didn’t enable what’s called a Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, a simple setting that would prevent hackers sending e-mails that appear to be from clintonemail.com.”
The publication of Clinton’s emails this week also demonstrates that senior Obama operatives David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and John Podesta were long aware of Clinton’s cloak-and-dagger email infrastructure. The irretrievably corrupt Clintons created the system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to the international cash-for-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
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